No Man’s Sky dev’s 3 year secret legal battle resolved

No Man’s Sky dev’s 3 year secret legal battle resolved

No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has settled three years of “secret stupid legal nonsense” over the space adventure’s title.

Founder Sean Murray revealed the hush-hush legal wrangling in a tweet this weekend, noting that the dispute turned on Sky UK LTD’s ownership of the word “Sky”. That’s right: an internet and subscription TV company has enough legal claim on a common word that it took three years to sort out whether a video game could release with a three-word title including said signifier.

This may seem unbelievably stupid to you (along with many matters of copyright, trademark and patent law) but it was a pretty serious matter: as Murray noted in a subsequent post, Sky managed to force Microsoft bow to its will in a similar case, and it’s not like Redmond’s short on lawyers.